handmade byour editor Move over Mark Zuckerberg, the AI guys are Silicon Valley’s rising stars
While Mark Zuckerberg’s generation created the digital playgrounds where we spent the last two decades, people like Alexander Wang, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Alex Karp are now building the cognitive engines of the future.
This is not the story of Mark Zuckerberg. This isn’t a story about Mark Zuckerberg, it’s telling itself. The world of Silicon Valley is changing. A new technology – artificial intelligence – is taking center stage. And it’s giving rise to a new crop of superstars, some of whom are already billionaires and all of whom remain the talk of the tech world.
The old guard is still around. Mark Zuckerberg remains in the drama with his missionary zeal and a big money bag. Similarly, we still have Sergey Brin of Google. Elon Musk remains on top in the world. People like Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel remain magnets around which tech empires turn and people move forward. But the conversation in Silicon Valley is now largely driven by new rising stars, not older veterans. There are new visionaries who are creating the technological future. This is a story about him.
Alexander set out to conquer the world
Since we started talking about Mark Zuckerberg, let’s first talk about Alexander Wang. Currently employed by Zuckerberg, Wang is one of those AI superstars destined to shape the future of the technology, not unlike what Zuckerberg did 20 years ago.
Although the verdict is still out on him, Wang’s stratospheric rise cannot be denied. He started Scale AI when he was just 19 years old, somewhat like Zuckerberg did with Facebook. In fact, like Zuckerberg, who left Harvard to pursue his own tech journey, Wang left MIT.
With AI becoming a hot topic, the scale grew rapidly. So fast that by 2021, Wang became a billionaire – the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 24. In 2025, Zuckerberg plans to spend $14.3 billion to achieve scale AI – but not in the classic sense. It was a move that was not intended to buy the company but to acquire Wang and his team so they could help Facebook build its own AI platform.
With Facebook’s vast resources open to him, Wang could eventually reshape the entire tech world, much in the same way Facebook once did. Zuckerberg trusted him so much that he made Wang his chief AI scientist within a few months of joining him. Essentially, he will now be responsible for almost every new major AI announcement you see from Meta, whether it’s large language model (LLM) updates such as the upcoming – but speculative – llama avocado to its own version of AGI, called superintelligence.
Dario, Demis and Sam
In AI trends, in recent years the definition of “tech visionary” has shifted from the social media or search and ad-tech moguls of the 2010s to those leading this new AGI field.
Wang is not alone. The new AI boys are the rising stars of Silicon Valley. Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has become increasingly prophetic when talking about the future, much like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates were in their heyday. With cloud AI on the rise and becoming a topic of discussion at dinner tables (it’s a tool that sparked a selloff in SaaS stocks a few days ago), Dario has become arguably the most important person in Silicon Valley.
Joining Dario are Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind. He is being seen as the architect of the next era.
Today, the anthropic is a big reason why it seems AI is advancing at breakneck speed, but despite all the progress, Amodei, often cited as a theoretical visionary among peers, remains firmly focused on safe “constitutional AI.” From time to time, he has been known to sound the alarm on job losses (he believes AI will eliminate 50 percent of all white-collar jobs by 2030) or the fact that selling high-end Nvidia chips to China is tantamount to giving nuclear weapons to North Korea. He is never short of words or ideas and has publicly stated in Davos during the World Economic Forum that it is okay to delay AGI if it means humans can use that time to learn to control it, a sentiment he shares with Demis Hassabis.
Hassabis, already a Nobel laureate, is widely considered the most credible visionary in the race to AGI. He describes the current scheme of things as “the most intense in 30 years” and clearly, this is where he shines. Time and again, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has made it clear that they had all the AI firepower in the world – possibly even before OpenAI took the world by storm with ChatGPT – but they didn’t expose it because perhaps it was premature and the world wasn’t ready. Whenever they decided to fire, Hassabis was the one behind the gun and the bullet.
But there is more to it than meets the eye. Unlike leaders who focus on AI’s ability to summarize emails – which Gemini does quite brilliantly these days – Hassabis is passionate about closing the loop, building AI systems that can envision, experiment and discover things that humans haven’t even thought to ask about yet. Their approach is entirely mission-driven: use science and mathematics to create general-purpose learning machines that solve real-world problems like climate change and diseases.
Then there’s Sam Altman. Although his public image has taken a bit of a hit over the past year, ups and downs are part of life on the high street. And Sam is driving fast. And no, we are not talking about the Koenigsegg Regera, which he is reportedly fond of.
Over the past 10 years, Altman has made ChatGPT a household name. Without him, AI revolution would not have happened in the world. Currently, Sam Altman sits in the middle of the AI world, as he tries to pull together both the business and science parts of artificial intelligence. He’s raising money, he’s trying to attract talent to OpenAI, he’s setting an AI vision for the future, but he’s also trying to grow OpenAI by finding its revenue in the face of competition from giants like Google and Meta. And meanwhile he is waging a bitter court battle, as well as occasional clashes on social media, with Elon Musk over the nature of OpenAI. In other words, Sam Altman is everywhere in the tech world, in a way that even Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs weren’t at their peak.
Carp (military) gathers forces
While Dario and Sam are the public face of the AI, Alex Karp is the man behind the scenes. Real world AI is where Alex Karp comes into the picture. His company Palantir, which he co-founded with Peter Thiel, is possibly one of the most mysterious companies in the world. But the company has become so important and influential that Karp can’t resist going public, trying to shape the conversation.
The Internet is full of videos and articles trying to explain what Palantir does, but there has always been an air of mystery about its business – hence, curiosity – even more so because it is known to work with government agencies, including Israel and the US military. What we do know is that it works with data and helps its customers make sense of this data. With data becoming more and more essential in the AI age, Palantir’s role cannot be underestimated.
Taking the cue, Karp, who himself has been largely secretive in the past, has begun to become more visible, setting up talking points on various forums. In Davos, he argued that the spark in technology has moved from digital toys to systems that can bear the weight of a nation. He says that AI will be the backbone of the real economy in the future and AI capability will decide which countries will remain superpowers and which will be left behind.
While Zuckerberg’s generation created the digital playgrounds where we spent the last two decades, people like Wang, Amodei, Altman, Hassabis, and Karp are building the cognitive engines of the future. They’re not just managing our data, they’re engineering an intelligence that may eventually surpass us. Whether this change leads to a utopia of scientific discovery or a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences, we can’t say for sure. But what we can say is this: the hoodie has been traded for a lab coat, and the social network has been replaced by neural networks.
